Broadway

Rockaway Park NY September 11, 2016 in the 45th year of the Society "I will take no bull from your house"

Awesome David Lawrence: Toward A more intelligent, less violent, less bigoted state.

[E]mpty-headed … limited thinkers who had "comfortable minds" … were ideologically unidimensional. [full of] the charitable feelings of selfish people…. [Their]causes multiply like rabbits in a cage. Not that the liberals really care about any of their causes. They just pretend because it reflects on themselves and allows them to feel better about themselves as good people. They want to feel indignant about how others treat others rather than examining their own failures.

Truly Awesome! Read more: at American Thinker

AWESOME David Lawrence : White Guy

I am a white man.
I have been given no concessions.
Life is more difficult ,,,
Sometimes I wish I were black so that I could
... complain about imagined unfairness

Truly Awesome Read more at Constitution Dot Com

Awesome David Lawrence: A Central Park Affair

85 nongovernment individuals have gotten access to the Secretary of State, [through] donat[ions] to the Clinton Foundation .. [in the hundreds of]million[s of] dollars .... They are French kissing Hillary`s corruption.

Truly Awesome Read more at Canada Free Press

Awesome David Lawrence: Divide and Rule

What simplistic liberals have decided that prejudice is negative rather than the ability to categorize and divide up opinions? That prejudice is the love of this; the hatred of that; and the possibility of seeing it the other way around. That prejudice is liberating and the ability to separate the countries of the mind.

Truly Awesome Read more at Constitution Dot Com

Awesome David Lawrence: MUNICH MASACRE: Olympics.... in `72.....

Do the [Muslim] pray five times a day for our deaths .

Truly Awesome Read More atConstitution Dot Com

Awesome David Lawrence: Wo-Bama on North Korean Nukes

When Obama draws a line in the sand, he doesn`t have a sword. He uses lipstick

Truly awesome Read more at American Thinker

David Lawrence: The false comparison of Weiner and Trump
[White] liberal[s] ... compar[e] Donald Trump`s picking up women twenty years ago to Anthony Weiner`s recent texting his privates to a fifteen-year-old girl... [White] liberals ... can`t distinguish perversion from flirtation... They mistake policing through stop and frisk into bigotry... and leave decent people to be harassed by thugs. They watch Muslims decapitate captives and burn them in cages. They justify this because Americans have occasionally accidentally bombed people who were using captives as human shields. Liberals like Obama and Hillary are afraid to use the term "radical Islam." ... They see the world as weak gray because they don`t have the courage to see black and white. So liberals go on confusing the definitions of the world and mistaking gym locker talk from The Donald for Weiner`s perversion.

TRULY AWESOME Read more: American Thinker

Awesome David Lawrence: VALUE FREE

Lacking values.... drowning in contradictions,
A liberal commits himself to an ideology of secular stupidity.
They aren`t reformers they`re Destroying everything as they go along
Like Hillary wiped her server.

AWESOME!

read more at EAGLE RISING TRULY AWESOME

We don`t need climate change. We need Obama to have a brain change.

Awesome David Lawrence: Wo-Bama vs Israel

Obama [promised] blow Israel`s planes out of the sky if [Israel] bombed Iran`s nuclear reactors. Now, thanks to Obama, Iran [has its reactors and a ton of US cash too]

EAGLE RISING

DAVID LAWRENCE: STAND UP: BE PROUD AND BE THANKFUL FOR YOUR BLESSINGS

[T]he selfish quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, ... [and] other self-loving [spoiled brats] ... follow[ing] ... him]... d[o]n`t care that he has destroyed the ratings for the NFL,.....[B]y denigrating the flag ... to stand ... against apocryphal prejudice[,] ... Kaepernick ... a second-string quarterback .. thinks only of himself. He is a selfish moron instead of a weapon against prejudice. I remember the days when blacks weren`t even allowed to be quarterbacks. He has everything the way his ancestors wished and all he can do is cry into the pigskin. Crybaby Kaepernick drones on, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color." He regurgitates, "There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." It didn`t occur to Kaepernick that black on black crime is more prevalent than white on black crime. Did he ever read the Chicago statistics? Were any of his friends murdered by blacks? Doubtful, he lives with the rich whites not homeboys. Kaepernick is divisive. He is a millionaire who dumps mock sympathy on his own head because he feels sorry for himself for no reason other than childishness.... Kaepernick is a lucky man. He is just not intelligent enough to know it. The riots in Baltimore and Ferguson stem from his sorry attitude. ...

Constitution Dot Com

Truly Awesome! is David Lawrence`s moniker given him by his wife Laren who foresaw great things for Dav. With a Ph.D. in literature Dave produces far too much for FP to handle. With his volume the best we can carry is excerpts He`s scribbled over 200 blogs, 600 poems, a memoir "The King of White-Collar Boxing," several books of poems, including "Lane Changes." Now on Amazon.com. Like a host of luminaries Jimmy Cagney, TR, Liam Neeson and George Patton, Dave was a first ratre boxer while he seriously engaged in professional pursuits. Last year he was listed in New York Magazine as the 41st reason to love New York. Fullosia Press listed Dave First.

Dr Jeff Wordsmith: Remember When
We Will Remember Them… At the Going Down of the Sun

Where does English all start? At the moment, we are 1 bn. of us, native or near-native speakers, spread across the globe in the fragments of an empire upon which “the sun never set” (because it was rising in some other English-speaking area as it was setting in another). And where does English all end? In the Creoles of the West Indies, the slang of the Deep South of America or the dialects of the North of England, Wenglish (Welsh English) or of Scotland? It is indeed a sobering thought to think that English speakers numbered only two millions at the start of the sixteenth century, when Henry Vlll was busy chopping the heads of his wives off, and four-and-a-half millions at the end, when Elizabeth sate upon the Throne and Virginia and Maryland had been colonised. English started in the tribal languages of Northern Europe, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes set sail in their long-boats across the Channel from Germany, where the Saxons lived in Saxony on the River Rhine and the Angles gave their name to Angle-land (Angleterre) or England. They were tempestuous times and the fierce tribes of the North were assailing the crumbling bastions of the failing Roman Empire on all sides being pushed on by tribes to the East of them, who were ultimately being displaced by a renascent Chinese Empire pressing inexorably upon the tribes to the West of China.

The Angles and the Saxons brought with them, the epic saga of “Beowulf”. He was the man, who fought the monster, who slew the folks in their rude huts and became the bogey man of these heathen tribes. They gradually Christianised from Lindisfarne (a small island off the shores of North-East England – Northumberland (“the land North of the Humber River”, which flows out through Hull) and the kings were very important in this. They rather liked the view of God as the King of Heaven, as the Emperor of Constantinople was his Vicar on Earth, and converted their subjects by the sword, if need be. So, Christianity, just like the Moslem religion, was spread by “the sword and the flame”. The Angles and Saxons were soon joined by the Vikings, who lived in the West of Scandinavia, in the valleys of Norway and the flooding lands of southern Denmark. Population pressure made them move. Originally, scholars and historians saw this movement as a bunch of wild men setting up a permanent army on English soil, raping the women as they went and propagating their seed in wild nights of lust. Now, some voices are being raised to say that long-ships full of women were brought along as well. (And the genes of English folks, especially along the East are often Viking genes akin to those of Scandinavia.) if that were the case, it would have been the most momentous move of mass, sea-borne migration in the Early Middle Ages and definitely belies the notion that these were a bunch of primitives. The Swedes generally moved East – they were the Ruotsilainen or Ruotsia to the Fins – and gave their name to Russia, often finishing up as the Varangian Guard of the Emperor of Constantinople. The Angles and Saxons fought tooth-and-nail with these newcomers but very largely lost. They wrote about their battles in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first work of history, by the way, but almost every chapter concludes, “And the Danes held the place of slaughter” i.e. the battle-field because they had routed the Anglo-Saxon Army. The tide was turned, however, by Alfred the Great, who, besides burning the cakes in the humble hovel of the peasant woman, into which he had ducked to hides from the Viking Army, put the Kingdom of Wessex (the West Saxons) firmly on the map. It occupied, at its height, the whole of southern England, up to Fosse’s Dyke - Bristol to Hull – the old Roman road that divided England into two. North of that lay the Danelagh (Dane Law) or the area ruled over by the Vikings. Alfred was very concerned that his people should read the Bible so he made sure it was translated from the Vulgate (People’s Lain) into Anglo-Saxon or Old English. These three works then, the epic poem of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the Old English translation of the Bible are all the written works of this period. They are not much but scholars still study them.

continued col 2

Dr James Davies, Lord Woodburry: TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE
By Appointment to The Dominus Imperatorum Socorum The Mentor presents 9-11 Mentorial

Greetings Dean:

I have termed this Mentorial THE TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE Mentorial, It is somehow fitting that the 9-11 Mentorial be so-called. You may recall at the time The Lord Dean and The Lord Mentor through entirely different postulates and analyses came to the same conclusion 9-11 at 9 was not a repeat of Pearl Harbor but more ominously a repeat of Port Artur where the western world was shocked by the Japanese success in devastating the base of the Russian Imperial Navy at Port Artur 100 years earlier.

Somehow in that light, it is prophetic that during my sojourn in the US army in `73, the Society, upon the recommendation of His Lordship The Lord-President adopted the Czarist Anthem of the old Russian Empire as its official hymn. I have always held out room for some hope until 9-11 shattered much of my confidence.

In the words of the Lord-Dean, in 2001 the Arabs succeeded where former English, Rebel and German enemies failed: a successful attack on the undefended East Coast.

Sadly, the Dean`s conclusions amplified by both scriptural readings and the teachings of Vladimir Illyurich Lenin and those assessments made more analytically and remorsefully by the Lord-Mentor turned out to be true. Those bright cheery projections based upon more over-confident appraisals of the situation, though seething with vows of bloody revenge, turned out to be phantasms. Said the Dean, it is unnecessary to chase the sand devils half-way around the globe when there are plenty here already to fight.

I`m sure the events of the past weeks have Foggy Bottom pining away for the days of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos who for all their numerous faults would never have contemplated what the Marcos` most recent successor the energetic and progressive Rodrigo Duterte has done.

The Society did report in its 4th of July issue that The Historic President in Red China to chair the G-20 was left on the tarmac by the Red Chinese without a Jacob`s ladder or a red carpet. When His History-ship climbed down somehow off His High Horse, the paparazzi were kept too distant to provide Hisb History-ship with photo ops and the national security advisor was left to ride the city bus, the very back of the bus.

The Society deemed it a suitable humiliation and praised Red China`s leadership for treating His History-ship like an unwanted nuisance. I would have preferred to regard the entire episode as excessive zeal by a local security official. I rejected the Society`s position that a man would have walked away. Indeed Dean His History-ship had all these rounds of historic meetings set up. The Historic President was to have presided over the G-20 which was to discuss vital Global issues such as climate change and global warming. How could His History-ship have justified his historic legacy if he had turned his back on all that?

On the other hand, the Dean, espousing conventional Societal wisdom, would have recommended that His History-ship "act like a man," given up the chairing of nothingness, and leave Red China with an empty chair, even insult them back by a side visit to Taiwan, some photo ops there with Tsai Ing-wen, the newly elected Taiwanist President of the Executive Yuan and a bit of an Historic President in her own right, wave some nationalist flags etc. All those little reminders should have in the Dean`s view been followed by a visit to the US`s only remaining genuine allies, South Korea and Philippians. The message to the People`s Republic might have been clear.

Instead, His History-ship managed to cause a rupture with one of the US`s last remaining allies, the Philippians. The newly elected Filipino President Rody Duterte has been on in a shooting war on drugs. Dealers and users are simply disposed on in the same way His History-ship maintains a "due-process-hit list." The Historic President was all too ready to criticize President Duterte even though in The Philippians, Mr Duterte, yet another History President himself, is extremely popular for curbing crime, out of control by drug traffickers.

At that moment, relations between the Philippians and Red China had soured over the Red Chinese claims to some uninhabitable crags in the Philippian archipelago. China has been building real islands out of these rocky out-croppings. Philippians brought Red China to the bar of justice at the world court. Although China rejected jurisdiction, the World Court refused to accept Red China`s ambitious claims. Both Red China and its breakaway province Nationalist China on Taiwan were outraged by the decision and vowed to ignore it.

Somehow, despite the opportunity to re-inforce ties with The Philippians, The Historic President angered the mercurial Duterte by criticizing due process executions committed there. The angry Filipino President denounce His History-ship. Filipinos should not, Mr Duterte announced in the Hall of The People in Peking, consider themselves the little brown brothers of the Americans but needed to rid themselves of the plague of drugs in their own way. The servile relationship of "yeas sihr massah boss," said The Filipino president was over. To rub it in just a little more The Filipino President told His History-ship that he intends to Holocaust Drug Dealers.

The latter remark drew a meek protest from His History-ship. His History-ship accepted as an apology Mr Duterte`s remark that the word Holocaust had developed a secondary meaning in US circles.

As an ultimate insult to the US, President Duterte accepted an invitation to visit Red China and was received with all the ruffles and flourishes withheld from His History-ship. On arrival President Duterte chided his Historic Counterpart describing in a speech given in the Great Hall of the People in Peking, the US as a military, political, economic and social failure. Red China praised Duterte for his hands-on approach to the war on drugs and offered assistance to Mr Duterte`s programme, noting that Red China eradicated the problem that the US is drowning in.

I may approach the problem differently than the Dean even though the significance of President Duterte`s remarks and his visit to Red China has not escaped me. Red China has been promoting Chinese politicians in other countries. Mayor Lee of San Francisco is but one example. Duterte despite that characteristic Spanish colonial name has a Chinese grandfather. Red China and perhaps Nationalist China too have a special department to handle overseas Chinese politicians.

President Duterte was regrettably not far off mark when he described the US as failing militarily. You may have noticed that the US was unable to set sail to meet the Russian Navy which blithely sailed down the North Sea in parade formation and waved.

US forces were unable to meet them. The new carrier USS Gerald Ford is as dysfunctional as the President; other ships lack sufficient crews to set sail, due to casualties in combat not spoken of in the Establishment Press..

The Lord-Dean has often charted the course of the failure of the Byzantine – Roman Empires upon which most of our institutions and public architecture are modelled. The collapse of the Byzant Navy occurred around 1000 AD after it was left to rot following a successful repulse of an Arab attack on the capital. Looking at the Dean`s list of compelling parallels between the contemporary US and Byzant – Rome I note that Byzantium – Rome took 5 centuries for the cumulative effects of bad decision making brought the empire down. The US has fallen to its knees in less than a decade.

President William J Clinton whom the Society calls Bubba Bill may have written the US`s epitaph when he frankly acknowledged that the US will never be great again.

I shan`t trouble The Dean with more wailing and gnashing of teeth. However, before I bid you a most Cheery Cherio, I wish to thank the Lord and Lady Dean and the Societal Hound for enduring my pissing and moaning and for their encouragement to rise up from my misfortunes.

On that note I bid you a Cheery Cherio,

James Davies, Lord Woodbury
Mentor RPPS

Dr Kelly White: a tanka from the news:

at Hiroshima
President Obama hugs
Shigeaki Mori
bomb survivor who honored
dead US POWs

Harrison Alfred Andrews: The Standard: A Review of The Eagle of The Ninth

The Eagle is an impressive vista on Roman Briton. It gives fair airing to Roman and Brythonic points of view.

Like Gaul, Eagle can be neatly divided into three parts: garrison life, life in the Roman colony and adventure north of the wall.

As the curtain opens we meet Marcus Flavius Aquilla (Channing Tatum) a newly minted commander on his way to a frontier outpost where Druids are rousing the restive Celts to action against the occupying Roman Army. Seasoned veterans at the officer`s mess are skeptical of the new commander. "He`s probably unpacking his rule-book," quips Galba (Paul Ritter).

Marcus surprises the officers and men with detecting an attack on the fort early enough to interdict it. There is quite a long wait in the dark of damp northern England during which Galba`s stare tells it all. However Lutorious (Denis O`Hare) stands by the commander seemingly with bemused detachment. To the experienced legionnaire`s surprise, Marcus was right. The Keltoi attack just as Marcus appears ready to call off the alert. New to the post, he isn`t used to all the nocturnal noise that conceals the approach of Celtic warriors.

Injured in combat Marcus is sent to his uncle`s villa in Southern Britain where Lutorious delivers news of the battle streamer awarded the unit, Marcus` medal and an honorable discharge.

Donald Sutherland plays Uncle Aurelius to perfection. As the most experienced actor in the cast he refrains from overpowering the stars Jaime Bell and Channing Tatum. But I think that Sutherland`s genius in this film was that he was playing himself: the elderly urbane white liberal, a man of bearing, sophistication, distinction, culture and refinement.

Inviting a notable to the dinner table, Uncle Aurelius chides the guests about his vegetarian fare: "fish and eggs; lets not all rush at once."

Uncle believes that slaves should serve voluntarily or be left to their own devices. Uncle buys Esca (Jaime Bell) a slave to tend to Marcus but doesn`t care if the slave runs away.

This Keltoi slave had been rescued by Marcus from a blood thirsty crowd in the arena because Esca had faced death unafraid. Reduced to personal servitude, Esca tells Marcus he hates everything Roman but will serve out of personal obligation, gratitude for being spared.

When the fully recovered Marcus decides on the adventure north of the wall to recover the lost Eagle of the 9th Legion Uncle with utter hypocrisy bluntly tells Marcus that one can not trust the word of a slave. "He says what he says and does what he does because he has to."

This sets the scene for the third act, the adventure north of the wall.

North of the wall there`s a role reversal, Marcus becomes Esca`s slave. Yet true to his word, Esca helps Marcus recover the Eagle and defend it from re-capture.

The film is exceptional, partially because the lines of the Keltoi are scripted in the once outlawed Gaelic language with subtitles. When the Romans speak, they speak in English.

Gregg Dotoli: Ever fee this way? :)

Someday When I`m There

You`ll see, change

brainwashed by idioms
leopards and spots, heh
people change
I can become pure
but just can`t undo done

ultra focus into vice and
rip out its ugly seeds
it works

You`ll see, change

girl, is your cell charged?
haven`t seen you on Madison Ave
was that call I missed yours?

You`ll see, change

I miss you , i`m ultrablue
without you
don`t leave, i`ll die

You`ll see, change

when my deflated heart heals
and I can get up
after love-shock
you`ll see
Someday when I`m there

Beauty being truths smile
I frown

Dr Jeff Wordsmith: We Want Our Independence – Brits Go Home!

But for Wales

The United Kingdom is le Royaume Unie of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Scots have chosen to be British in their referendum of last year. They have also chosen the Scottish Nationalist Party to represent them at Westminster and that has left Labour, which traditionally represented them, with not enough MPs, which is why the Tories are in power. The Scots were promised: No pound; No British big firms in Scotland; No automatic entry into Europe, unless they applied (it takes years), and every one of the twenty-eight countries, including at that time GB, has a veto, but they could keep the Queen and Balmoral (the Buckingham P of Schotland). Now they want IN in Europe. They also want their referendum all over again. This is the avowed aim of the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party). The wrangle continues. The Scots are a dour lot and want their oats (i.e. porridge) and eat it.

The Northern Irish also want the EU. In spite of the Unionist Party (the Protestant Party, which wants Union with GB) being the biggest party, they do not really like Westminster. They are now considering going it alone without the Mother(f-) of Parliaments. They do not really like England after thirty years of Troubles. They were very narrowly persuaded to accept the Northern Irish Constitution. Now they want OUT.

Where does this leave Wales? It is not part of the UK because it is not a country but a Principality ruled by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, the son of the King (or Queen) of England. However, it feels itself to be a country and the Welsh Nationalist Party is very strong and Welsh is a relatively strong language (taught now in universities and schools). It has, however, a small population of two-and-a-half million people. They, however, want their Independence, too. Like Scotland and Northern Ireland, they have their own Parliament and First Minister (not PM because only the UK has this and Westminster rules – OK).

The modern British Constitution like the American Constitution is very complex. Essentially, you Americans, have States Rights and Federal Law but no State in the Union really want Independence. This is what Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland want. The Welsh also do not want to vote Labour any more, which they have traditionally done ever since Lloyd George, a Welshman, was PM. This has left Labout high and dry with only the North supporting it.

They will have to make inroads into the South, the South-East (London) and the West Midlands (the Swing States) of England now. Otherwise, there is no alternative to Mrs. May and Boris. England is very much a country in disaaray. Economically sluggish, no real social mobility in comparison to Germany and the States and now questioning its own rights to self-existence. It is typicaly a “rump” state i.e. that which is left over after Empire.

Dr. Jeff Wordsmith.

Dr. Jeff Wordsmith: The Whisper of the Voice of God

I hear the Whisper
Of the Voice of God
On the winds of the desert

On the cold winds
Of the Far North
Where the snow falls
Almost all year

The Whisper of the
Breath of Spring
The warmth of the new day

When the corn in the meadow nods
In ripe autumn
When crops fall
Before the scythe
Of Winter

The cold, white
Blizzard of ice
And drifting snow

I hear the Whisper
Of God
In everything

It whispers me to go
With Him
And one day
I will

Treading to the stars
Like the soul of a Pharaoh
Walking in the Elysian Fields
Tall and proud
Like a Greek god

But till that day
I shall have my feet
Planted
Firmly in the clay

~ Dr Jeff Wordsmith

Dr Jeff Wordsmith: Remember When
con't from col 1

Kings came and went. Ethelred the Unready had to pay Danegeld or Dane gold to keep his kingdom and King Canute (Knud) set his throne upon the shores of the sea, just to prove that he could not make the waves of the ocean obey him. The language became a problem because although the Vikings did not speak exactly English, they could just about understand it and vice versa. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” became an epic poem written in Northern English (dialect? language?) and is mostly studied in translation in modern English today. Great tracts of southern Scotland were added to the countries of Northumberland from the North of the Humber up to Edinburgh (the borough or town of Edwin) and similarly on the north-west side of England. Wales, however, remained independent and so did the clans of northern Scotland. Ireland was ravaged by the Vikings but only partly conquered. However, England finally emerged. And was conquered. Harald Godwinson marched up to Stamford Bridge in East Yorkshire (close to where I come from, in fact, and a very sleepy, pretty village it is, these days) and trounced the Norwegian Army of Harald Hardrada. England ceased to be a Scandinavian appenage. Harald then turned south with his housecarles (personal bodyguard) and his fyrd (peasant army) and made one of the greatest and fastest marches of the Middle Ages. He made the mistake of leaving his arrows along with his baggage-train in London and got one in the eye from the advancing Normans. They were an Army of Cavalry, clad in coats of mail, and they feinted by running away on their horses, thereby luring the English after them, only to turn and defeat them. The Battle of Senlac Hill saw the English fyrd on the flanks with the housecarles in the centre but after being lured from their perch, the Battle of Hastings, as the Normans called it, was easy meat.

Duke William of Normandy proceeded to London, where he became King William l of England. He promptly built the Tower of London – to keep the Londoners in line – and many other moat-and-bailey castles to keep the peasants pinned down. The baron in his castle oversaw his villeins (villains) and his cavalry punished any uprising. England became the most centralised country in the whole of Europe. The Doomsday Book dates from this period. A “doom” is an old-fashioned word for “law” and it simply catalogues all the land, all the animals, the crops, the buildings and the peasants, who were bought and sold along with it (like Russian serfs later). These new Frenchmen, who were really “Normans” or North-men, third-generation Vikings, who had adopted the style of the French cavalry of “knights”, were there to rule, and the feudal system, whereby the king relied on his vassals, whom he rewarded with land, was introduced to Western Europe into England. The Bordeaux Tapestry celebrates this period and provides much of our knowledge of the Battle of Hastings.

The language underwent a sea-change. The two languages of French or Norman French (a form of Langue d’Oil) were spoken alongside one another in England. The Anglo-Saxon peasant looked after the cows, which became beef (boef) on the table of his French lord and the sheep (or mutton/mouton), when it was dressed to eat. But the whole system of inflections, which characterises Old English just disappeared due to the extent of relexification (the process of replacing words by their French equivalent). The plural form of one of the feminine declensions, for instance, ended in –s and that gives us our regular English plural today as this system simply took over, bloomed like algae and became regularised. This whole process was more or less completed by the time of the “Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer, the “Father of the English language”.

“When April with his shoures soote
Hath pierced the drogte of March to the roote
‘Tis then that Pilgrim’s go on Pilgrimage…”

is about how it starts, if my memory does not play tricks on me, and it is plainly written in a way that is sort of comprehensible to any English speaker today. (Which Old English is not.) It was a great poem and a deliberate introduction of the style of “modern” poetry writing into English. The poem is cut up into bits or tales, which each of the Pilgrim tells on his way to Canterbury, the great Archbishopric of England, which is still the Head of the English Anglican Church ahead of York, which I know so much better having worked there and seen that cathedral on a daily basis. The Miller probably has the best tale to tell because it is easily the bawdiest. It’s all about a young man, who sticks his bum out the window in the dark to be kissed by the unfortunate swain, who promptly takes his revenge by sticking a red hot poker up (the form of death actually meted out to a homosexual King (Queen?) of England in later centuries.

The next step in the formation of the English language was Caxton’s Printing Press. Introduced to England from Germany (to which it had been introduced from China). It tended to fix the spelling of the language in a way that the “Illuminated Manuscripts” (“written by hand”) never had. It was convenient to spell the words the same way and although Shakespeare wrote his name in seven different ways and was wayward in his spelling, too, English had developed a recognisable orthography by the eighteenth century with, true enough, some slight differences and archaic features. “ Cough”, “bough”, “nought” etc. were in to stay. “Light” reflects “ligt” (Dutch), “Licht” (German and “lugt” (Danish).

However, what of the French language? It looked all set to take over. Chaucer was a one-off. A bi-lingual, he chose to write in English. Meanwhile the Plantagenet Empire was going great guns. Avignon, Crecy, Agincourt and Plessy gave England half of Western France. The bow-men of yore really shot up the French cavalry and chivalry (chevaliers) had a definite nick in its armour. But Jean d’Arc took it away again. By the time of the meeting of Henry Vlll’s “Cloth of Gold” with Francis l of France and poor Mary, his daughter, dying “with Calais written across my heart” (Calais was the last French port lost to England), all had been lost. Although the Kings of England were to style themselves “King of France” for centuries afterwards (What’s in a name, a rose by any other name, would smell as sweet”), it was lost forever and Victoria had to make do with “Empress of India”.

There was also another language, which was extremely important for the whole of Europe. That was the language of Latin. It formed the lingua franca (oops! French language) for the intelligentsia (the clerics of the Church) and the nobility. You could go anywhere with Latin. Milton (“Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained”) claimed that when he wrote with his right hand, he wrote with Latin and it was his left hand, he used to write English with. Luther, however, disagreed. He not only broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church with his Reformation but brought an end to the use of Latin with his translation of the Bible into German. Then English was translated first into the Wycliffe Version and then into the James l translation, which in my view, and that of many others, has never been surpassed.

The Renaissance was late in arriving into England. The Quattrocento (14th Century) became the Sixteenth Century in England. Shakespeare was around. Kid’s “Spanish Tragedy” formed the basis of all his plays – historical, comic and tragic – and never has there been a playwright so successful as him. Of course, many scholars have concluded that Francis Bacon wrote at least half of them. They somehow forget that the two were the best of friends, and may even have been lovers, and that Shakespeare probably turned to his buddy and said, “Write, Frankie, it’s time you roght a line or two because my fingers are used up to the bone” and this is how they probably got written. Their relationship was probably the same as that of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, writing “The Wasteland” “together”, although Ezra took the praise as the Editor (“il miglior fabbro”) and T.S. gets the credit for having written it. Who cares? I don’t. After the play came the novel. Whatever inspired Cervantes to write in prose? He wanted to write about the ruin of Spain brought about by the advent of modernisation. That is the whole point of Don Quixote tilting against windmills. Windmill’s in their time – long before Watt’s steam-engine and Kay’s Spinning-Jenny – were the most “modern” things imaginable and fighting them was the old-fashioned knight on his jalopy – read “Rosamund”, his trusty steed – aided and abetted by Sancho Panchez. Cervantes was also gay so the mind boggles at the relationship of those two old fogies.

Bunyan, however, put the novel into English with his “Pilgrim’s Progress”. He cashed in on that everlastingly popular penchant for religious tracts so popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see his hero trudging through the “Valley of Despond” through the hills along the stile path of Righteousness. It was a great hit. Fielding followed up a century later with “Tom Jones” in which all the characters are paper-thin caricatures. Charles Dickens, who started off as a poor orphan in a bottle-washing factory, took this art of caricaturising to sublime heights. Meanwhile, Thackeray wrote “Vanity Fair” with a heroine for his largely female readership and “A Lady” (Jane Austen) wrote of the importance of a Lady getting her Right Man (and that brougham-and-four) with a subtle psychological reflection. She was followed by the Bronte sisters with their wild, natural combinations of North York moors (again, My Country) and human nature (Heathcliff) and George Elliot, the woman with the man’s name, who brought European thinking into English writing. Joseph Conrad was a Pole, who wrote in English. Zola socialised the novel, Tolstoy, “War and Peace”, gave it a world stage and Kafka philosophised it. My favourite, though, is still “Huckleberry Finn” and what of “The Great Gatsby”, that monumental tribute to the New York patriarchy. Steinbeck and Hemmingway dominate the twentieth century and New York today is the Cradle of the Literary World. But what of the English Language? That small, off-shore Island, whose ships traversed the globe and whose factories became the Power House of the World? What of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”? Or, is English alone in the Universe, a soup-a-nova in a far-off galaxy? Well, there are the Scandinavian languages. Danish (5m), Norwegian (4.5m) and Swedish (9m). These are the closest languages to English and they are none of them very world-shattering in terms of size. Dutch is also very close but even closer actually to German but very much a “cousin” to English. German, itself, in spite of many differences to English still has the Habsburg Jaw. My favourite language, however, is Friesian, which with a quarter of a million native speakers, largely in Holland, is said to be the closest language to English. I once met a Dutch broadcaster in Friesian. A quarter of a million does not exactly square up to 1 bn. What is the difference between all these minor languages and English? Well, that, My Friend, is History!

Dr. Jeff wordsmith

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